Broad Street, Hereford; Will spending £5m on it reduce our CO2 output?
Is the council’s plan to tinker with the layout of this street genuine environmentalism, or just a ruse to bolster city centre retail sales?
UNDER a most misleading banner headline, which refers to ‘£5m to improve city transport in Hereford’, the current edition of the Herefordshire Council quarterly Herefordshire Matters reports that a major upgrade is scheduled for Broad Street.
Back in July, the Dept for Transport announced a £4.97-million grant to Herefordshire Council to implement its successful Local Sustainable Transport Fund bid submission. Element 6 (covering city centre public realm access and permeability) promised “environmental improvements to Broad Street which would provide a high-quality shared space corridor, creating a powerful linkage from semi-pedestrianised Widemarsh Street to the new Cathedral Close improvements and the Mappa Mundi Museum.”
It’s hard to unscramble all this management speak, which now seems to be de rigueur with ministerial statements and council announcements, but what it appears to be admitting is that some of this £4.97-million funding will be diverted to pay for superficial (or ‘tarting up’ as one correspondent to the Hereford Times put it) improvements to link Widemarsh Street with Cathedral Close. Some might query whether this isn’t more to do with enhancing the ‘retail experience’ for visitors to the city centre (bear in mind that Stanhope’s ESG shopping centre faces the bottom of Widemarsh Street), than promulgating genuine national sustainable transport policies. Little chance that we’ll be seeing electric-powered Machester Metro trams or even free Boris bicycles bounding down Broad Street!
The council’s sustainable transport office says that the proposed Broad Street improvements will include a road layout designed ‘to reduce the dominance of motor vehicles’, and thus CO2 emissions. How the large number of bus pick-ups and set-downs – including schools transport and tourist coaches – from outside Pizza Express will be handled isn’t clear. It also claims that walking to and between shops is part of the sustainable transport ethos currently being promoted by the government.
Little has been heard of the council’s much-delayed Park-and-Ride masterplan, a ‘green idea’ which has been on and off its ‘must do soonest’ wish list for more than a decade. Oxford – now virtually car-free – has had P&R for 38 years. Nor are we any closer to transforming Hereford’s railway station (a city ‘gateway’ worth celebrating if there ever was one) into a true multi-modal transport interchange. Many Herefordians might say that either / both these ideas should have been given priority – as genuine sustainable transport initiatives – to tarting up Broad Street.